Women by the Waterside, with Pitchers

In 1895 Bernard was living in Cairo. He had arrived at the end of 1893 and would stay about ten years, wearing local dress, married since the previous summer to Hanenah Saati. That year he was given walls to paint at the Cathédrale de la Vierge in the city. Away from the church work he kept going back to one subject he had found along the Nile, women coming down to the water with jars, robed, seen from a distance, their faces mostly left out. He wrote to his mother that these people had shown him what life could be in a simpler and nobler form. Most writing on Bernard stops with Brittany, so this Egyptian stretch of his work, including this upright canvas of 62.8 by 45.4 centimetres, has had far less attention.